A disabled man in Manchester has been beaten to death by a group of ‘vigilantes’ who wrongly thought he was a paedophile. The police are now working against local bigotry that seems unconcerned by the pleas of innocence. Perhaps it’s enough to be accused of being a paedophile nowadays to expect to have your head beaten in.

The victim’s innocence aside, it is the people who carried out the attack that we should be looking at. These men obviously have psychotic tendencies themselves. They think their behaviour can be excused because their victim was a hate figure to some, but it can’t. Their act was brutal and carried out on mere rumour. Ill-informed gossip was enough to set them off on a sadistic murder. The group responsible are no better than murderers who kill at random.

The right-wing tabloid agenda of paranoia and hysteria has no doubt helped create this situation, where locals show more distaste to the innocent victim killed by their rumours than the lunatics who carried out his murder.